Keith Owens reminds us of the chilling truth that while some things have changed in the South, some things remain the same.
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Stick with me on this one.
My grandfather—my mother’s father—was from Jackson, Mississippi. In his final years, during my childhood, he came to live with our family in Denver, Colorado. He had been living in Los Angeles, a long time gone from Mississippi by that time. Yet, I still remember the way his face changed when he told me in a hushed voice that he had seen a young man lynched there when he was a much younger man. I can’t even remember what precipitated that conversation, only that it happened.
I also remember the story about my great-grandmother, his mother, who was a white woman with raven black hair. My mother saw a picture of her once, but I never did. She and my great-grandfather actually lived on a farm together right there in Mississippi. A free black man and a white woman. Raising their children. It explained my grandfather’s skin coloring, which was has been referred to as everything from ‘high-yella’ to fair-skinned. My mother is fair-skinned as well.
As the story goes, if I remember it correctly, there did come a time when my great-grandfather had to escape from a bunch of angry white men by swimming down a river until he could get to safety.
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Anyway, as the story goes, if I remember it correctly, there did come a time when my great-grandfather had to escape from a bunch of angry white men by swimming down a river until he could get to safety. The white men had never been particularly pleased about this black man married to a white woman and raising their mixed-race kids in “their” Mississippi on that farm. Looking back, I wonder if maybe the reason why it took so long for their anger to get sufficiently lit before deciding it was time for a lynching was that my great-grandmother was thought to be part Choctaw. Which would of course mean, if she was mixed with Choctaw, that she wasn’t a thoroughbred white person. Which, possibly, kind of left those poor angry white fellas in a bit of a quandary. Because to lynch my great-grandfather, I mean, would that have really been defending white womanhood since great-grandma wasn’t, well, you know …?
Oh mighty, mighty drop of blood.
But ultimately, the fact that she looked just like a white woman was apparently good enough because, after all, appearances do matter. So off they went to apparently try to lynch great-granddaddy, only he got warned somehow and got away. I was a teenager at the time, when granddaddy told me about the lynching he witnessed, and just learning about our history as black people, so I really didn’t know what to say to that. And granddaddy never mentioned any of that ever again.
Mississippi remains one of those southern states (more so than any of the others, truthfully) that has never been able to shake the ugliness and fear that its name represents, anymore than a slave could break his chains.
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Now fast forward to Jackson, Mississippi today. Because despite all that so many residents of ‘The South’ have done, both black and white, to put the past behind them and build on the ‘New South,’ Mississippi remains one of those southern states (more so than any of the others, truthfully) that has never been able to shake the ugliness and fear that its name represents, anymore than a slave could break his chains. Some of the reasoning for continuing to vilify Mississippi as backward and racist is simply unfair because it’s easy. It means we don’t have to look elsewhere, like to Ferguson or Staten Island, where it gets hard to breathe. But then there are incidents like the recent—very recent—modern-day lynching of yet another black man in Mississippi by a pack of angry white men. James Craig Anderson, 48, was beaten severely by the pack in a Jackson parking lot before they decided to run his body over with their truck while shouting, “White power.”
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The difference between ‘now’ and ‘then’? It was a black federal judge in Mississippi who pronounced the sentence on those men. U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves is one of only two African-Americans to have ever served as federal judges in Mississippi. Here’s some of what he had to say prior to sentencing, but I suggest you read his remarks in their entirety.
How could hate, fear or whatever it was transform genteel, God-fearing, God-loving Mississippians into mindless murderers and sadistic torturers? I ask that same question about the events which bring us together on this day. Those crimes of the past, as well as these, have so damaged the psyche and reputation of this great state.
Mississippi soil has been stained with the blood of folk whose names have become synonymous with the civil rights movement like Emmett Till, Willie McGee, James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Vernon Dahmer, George W. Lee, Medgar Evers and Mack Charles Parker. But the blood of the lesser-known people like Luther Holbert and his wife, Elmo Curl, Lloyd Clay, John Hartfield, Nelse Patton, Lamar Smith, Clinton Melton, Ben Chester White, Wharlest Jackson and countless others, saturates these 48,434 square miles of Mississippi soil. On June 26, 2011, four days short of his 49th birthday, the blood of James Anderson was added to Mississippi’s soil.
The common denominator of the deaths of these individuals was not their race. It was not that they all were engaged in freedom fighting. It was not that they had been engaged in criminal activity, trumped up or otherwise. No, the common denominator was that the last thing that each of these individuals saw was the inhumanity of racism. The last thing that each felt was the audacity and agony of hate, senseless hate: crippling, maiming them and finally taking away their lives.
But what remains the same? Chaining ‘now’ to ‘then’? History is the beast that will not die. Will not blink.
Originally published on Blue Route.
Photo—aloyr/flickr
Sure there’s a difference between then and now. Now you have African-Americans (Judge and the family) deciding the life and death fate of whites. And do you know what? They decided on life for the guilty. This stands in the starkest contrast to the many times when whites decided on death for the innocent. For those out there still foolishly looking for evidence of a superior race I think the verdict is in. The sub-humans have been identified. It turns out they’ve been murdering the humans again. And that’s a story that’s as old as time.
well said. after living in a “liberal” part of the country for 18 yrs then moving to gulf coast of mississippi it took me several years to figure out what was “off “, different from my experience. it wasn’t until i, by accident, read the jim crow laws. then i started to understand, put the pieces together.
hate is a terrible thing.
thank you for your writing.
As W.B Faulkner observed over FIFTY years ago apropos of the South-“The past isn’t dead- it isn’t even the past!”
Racism was pretty well hidden until President Obama got elected the first time, and Oh Boy, did the racists really came out from the wood work!!!.